To whom it may concern,
Our daughter started slipping in her senior year of high-school. She became very secretive about her life, she was missing school and seemed to be on drugs. It was impossible to have any kind of conversation with her, she was so much on the defensive.
We tried 2 different therapists and an outpatient drug program. Nothing worked. She somehow graduated and we were trying to talk about the future with her but she was always very evasive. At the beginning of the Summer, she chose to go back to a camp where she had been for the last three years, the last year, as a counselor in training. Since she made up her mind at the last minute, there was only space for a kitchen helper. She went. She lasted 4 weeks again and then got a friend to pick her up and bring her home.
Things were the same, her staying out and not coming back for a few days. Then she would come back, sleep a lot and be very disheveled and unapproachable. We had a trip going back to see family and friends coming up and 2 days before leaving, she declared that she could not come with us, this was no longer her life. We tried everything for her to come along but she was so stubborn. We were losing our patience. It had been a year of constant tension and confrontations. We could not tie her up and force her on the airplane …
On her 18th birthday, she left. After a while, letters from attorneys in LA came to our house, offering their services. I started talking to a pi and he said for me to think of what she could have done in the past that would trigger this. Then, we got more letters, I called again and that’s when we found out that she had been arrested a few times for prostitution and had been released from a jail that afternoon.
We tried many times to find her and to think of ways to get her out of there. She finally called right around thanksgiving. She stayed with us until January 3rd and then took off again. This time we called Thomas Lauth and started working with him. He was very thorough trying to understand the history of our situation and acted very quickly. After a few telephone calls and e-mail exchanges, he came to see us and got a lead. He had asked us to prepare letters and pictures to give to our daughter. That turned out to be a brilliant idea. All three of us flew to Phoenix and on our first night there he found our daughter and the only thing that we were able to do was to give her that folder with the letters and the pictures.
On two other occasions, Tom traced our daughter’s whereabouts, and every time we managed to have contact with her which, I think, was the reason why she eventually came back. Knowing that we were not giving up.
When we felt hopeless, Tom would encourage us to not give up. His amazing perseverance and promptness to act is what saved us.
Brigitte